With the spring auction season about to move into high gear, everyone’s talking about The Scream, one of four versions Edvard Munch made of the now-iconic image. It comes up for sale on Wednesday night, and like others I did a double-take when I first learned of Sotheby’s titanic estimate — $80 million, the highest presale number Sotheby’s has ever set. (It didn’t even bother with “Estimate on Request,” its normal but unfortunate practice for such high estimates.)
Like the unnamed art historians cited by The New York Times in today’s Arts & Leisure section, I don’t think the work is worth that, though I know full well that it’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay. Sotheby’s, presumably, has many interested bidders, and we’ll find soon enough if “interest” translates into cash on the table. The Times piece and one in Friday’s Wall Street Journal discuss who might be interested (Russians, Asians, Qataris) and the marketing of the piece.
Unless it fails to sell, The Scream now faces an unfortunate fate, imho: when people look at it, they’ll see dollar signs before they see the art. That’s certainly the case with Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was purchased by Ronald Lauder for his Neue Galerie for $135 million in 2006, as well as with other works that fetched stratospheric numbers (particularly if they sold at auction).
This all depends, of course, on if the public is allowed to see it at all, which depends on who buys The Scream; the buyer’s own circumstances will determine whether and when we see it. It has been 22 years since van Gogh’s Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million to the late Ryoei Saito, and we haven’t seen it since.
How much would The Scream have to fetch to exceed that record, the highest reached at public auction, in comparable dollars? According to the U.S. Inflation Calculator, $82.5 million then would be $144.8 million today.
That, of course, isn’t the record for all sales. If the transaction went through — and there’s talk that it did not – that honor belongs to Cezanne’s Card Players, which reportedly sold to the royal family of Qatar last year for $250 million.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s